waffle

Valve introduces a new skew on DRM for Steam. They generate an executable that’s essentially a singleton. You can make as many copies ad you’d like, but never run it on more than one computer at a time. If other people do illicitly copy your executable to keep it running and block you from playing, they’ll also need to nick your account details, since you need to be logged in to run it. (Unfortunately, when the executable can be swiped like that, chances are the account details can be as well.)

It’s an interesting solution. Regardless of what some report, it’s still DRM (the online authentication using your account bit tipped me off), but it’s nice that Steam, a service that’s actually reliant on it as opposed to most of the media industry, is willing and able to look at various methods of implementation to minimize pain.

Moreover, I advise that the iPhone software platform must be opened.

New Zealand rolls back Section 92A [of the Copyright Amendment (New Technologies) Act] and starts over instead of letting it go to vote due to public outcry. I’ve covered IPRED here before, and I’m not sure exactly in detail how similar the two were, but I do know that they shared the doctrine of, as Slashdot puts it, “guilty upon accusation, without appeal”. (IPRED does bring the case to court, it’s just very expensive to repudiate for any one defendant, and practically impossible to prove your innocence. The onus should never be to prove that a law wasn’t infringed; if you have to assume that the law is being infringed by default, what does that say about the law?)

Congratulations on a job well done, New Zealanders. We’re all kiwis today.

I’ve just seen the WPF state of the union from MIX09 and it’s starting to thaw. I’ve had the opportunity to use WPF for a smaller project of sorts since January’s experiences, and it confirmed every aspect of what I thought about WPF; both the strengths and the crap.

Which is why it delights me that the “pale” tooling, like Jaime promised, has improved greatly with regards to not having to hold your nose and dive into the XAML tab every sixth second because this team just can’t recreate the brilliant bucket of flowers that was the, what, Visual Basic 2 design environment. (Okay. Breathe.) Also, when you do have to dive in there, Intellisense now knows about “markup extensions” (basically tags within attributes) which is great because you’ll type one about every third second or your application will be a worthless husk of static, non-databound content that may not even animate that much, and your fellow ISVs and MVPs will laugh, nod, fail completely to take Microsoft to task over any actual shortcoming and have another beer. (My business card reads “grizzled”.)

Anyway, these are good steps forward, even though I will maintain that this should have been there all along. I might even stop carrying garlic and crucifixes while working with WPF within the next decade. (And I remind you that the only reason I’m so indignant is because I had expectations.)

Moreover, I advise that the iPhone software platform must be opened.

Something that we all knew two years ago and that became even more evidently clear this Tuesday was that when Apple decided to base the iPhone on OS X, they had to start from scratch. This is a bit unfair since they had a kernel, driver infrastructure, BSD service layer and so on and already had in place after a recompile and a few tweaks what would take months to build by hand, but that’s not strictly what I’m referring to.

Most mobile phones out there are based on technical foundations years in the making. For most non-smartphones, here’s how it goes: The operating system is a real-time operating system, often developed and maintained by a special company. On top of this: several layers of abstraction, some device-specific, some company-specific, and in this hodgepodge, new functions have continually been added and kneaded back in. (For smartphones, the stack of companies involved is flatter.)

I can easily see why Apple didn’t want to adopt one of these solutions, and I can also see what they’re busy doing all day now: adding back in “missing functionality”. This is functionality that was accumulated, maintained and supported over ages on the existing platforms, functionality that may have helped the complexity of mobile phones but that are nevertheless now almost certainly used by at least hundreds of thousands of people (things like SMS receipts), and functionality that is essential because of widespread usage and usefulness (things like MMS).

When Gruber asks “What’s with the “or all the other stuff that should have been in iPhone 1.0” silliness? Does Segan really think these features haven’t taken time and effort to develop? Should Apple have waited until this coming summer to ship the first iPhone?”, I suspect it’s an effort to acknowledge that Apple really is getting in at the ground floor both in terms of existing implementation and experience, which both helps and hurts them. It comes off as a bit disingenuous, though.

Apple’s goal with the iPhone clearly was to “reinvent the mobile phone”, which includes keeping what’s good and doing it better, and letting you do entirely new things. Just doing one of those doesn’t fit my description of “reinvent”. (YMMV.) They chose to focus on making the interface better, the features more easy to find (and fewer, honestly, by reducing clutter), the music player on par with an iPod and the Internet more eminently browsable. They put a lot on their plate, but I still think they made a mistake by omission.

If you look at the top five things most people do with their mobile phones (pre-iPhone, anyway), very high on that list will be “messing around with the camera”. Almost all the things people miss from the iPhone fall directly out of this: you can’t capture video, the photo quality isn’t very good, you can’t send or receive pictures and videos via MMS or Bluetooth. If you have to file this, this is personal media creation and sharing — something Apple’s historically very good at. iLife and even Photo Booth are great successes and selling points for the Mac. People are now switching to iPhone in what can only be described as “droves” anyway, but I will bet that they are, or at least have been, losing out on a big market who doesn’t want to drop the multimedia abilities.

Those who took to browsing switched to iPhone fairly swiftly, even during the GSM/EDGE days, maybe because of better access to Wi-Fi. If you look at the reason for the next influx of customers, I don’t think the 3G or GPS did it as much as the applications for the everyman and maybe push mail for the suits. I still don’t think Apple’s really captured the “messing around with the camera” market. I think it’s relatively large, and MMS is alive and well not because we all enjoy overpaying for what is basically email, but because it’s so easy and it’s so entrenched. Discount Blackberry owners, and I think you’ll see very few people having wired up email to their phones. I’m willing to bet less than a third of the iPhone owners actively use email on it, and less than half even have it set up.

So to wrap this all up, I don’t think Apple did wrong by not including everything in the first iPhone, but I’m starting to think that they targeted the wrong crowd with the first iPhone. Imagine how much more likely it would have been that it’d take off with just a little better functionality from the get-go for media creation and sharing, maybe at the expense of a few more months in the schedule. I am convinced that they could have done that well before the end of 2007.

Apple didn’t sell, at first, lots of iPhones because they could still do everything useful that your old phone could, unless your needs were relatively spartan and truly restricted to calling people and sending SMS messages. They sold lots of iPhones because they could do the basics, and they did browsing well, and they were cool and easy to use. For every broad feature they could have added, they would have made it significantly easier for some group of millions of mobile phone owners to make the leap. It is my belief that the best choice they could have made for an additional broad feature is that of dealing with media — that is my point.

Moreover, I advise that the iPhone software platform must be opened.